Books in the Global Health Histories series

Population Politics in the Tropics explores colonial population policies in Angola between 1890 and 1945 from a transimperial perspective. Using a wide array of previously unused sources and multilingual archival research from Angola, Portugal and beyond, Samuel Coghe sheds new light on the history of colonial Angola, showing how population policies were conceived, implemented and contested. He analyses why and how doctors, administrators, missionaries and other colonial actors tried to grasp and quantify demographic change and 'improve' the health conditions, reproductive regimes and migration patterns of Angola's 'native' population. Coghe argues that these interventions were inextricably linked to pervasive fears of depopulation and underpopulation, but that their implementation was often hampered by weak state structures, internal conflicts and multiple forms of African agency. Coghe's fresh analysis of demography, health and migration in colonial Angola challenges common ideas of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism.

"A revisionist history of epidemic disease as experienced by northern Indigenous peoples in present day Canada's Yukon and Northwest Territories between 1860 and 1940. Liza Piper connects the history of epidemics in northern North America to persistent health disparities arising from settler colonialism"--

In this examination of the early globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, Laurence Monnais argues that colonialism played a crucial part in the worldwide diffusion of modern medicines, speaking to contemporary concerns regarding over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, self-medication, and the accessibility of effective drug treatments.

Hungary was one of the first countries to introduce a national oral vaccination campaign against polio, built on years of scientific collaboration between East and West. Dora Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War. This title is also available as Open Access.

This new and unique visual history of AIDS focuses on the AIDS atlas, published by dedicated clinicians between 1986 and 2008. The epidemic's history is retold through clinical photographs, epidemiological maps and icons of HIV asking how this devastating epidemic has come to be seen as a controllable chronic condition.

Suman Seth offers dramatically new ways to understand the mutual construction of medicine, race, and empire in the eighteenth century. Readers will find medical writers engaging with abolitionism and the care of the enslaved, and will be able to track the ways that medicine created modern notions of racial difference.

A history of the World Health Organization, covering major achievements in its seventy years while also highlighting the organization's internal tensions. This account by three leading historians of medicine examines how well the organization has pursued its aim of everyone, everywhere attaining the highest possible level of health.